


The Blessing

by Rubynye



Category: The Battle of the Tollense Bridge
Genre: Bondage, Chains, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Plague, Rape Aftermath, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 07:25:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18205322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: “You may have my blessing,” she said, and as she did, she stood up straight and tall, as if her chains no longer weighed upon her.





	The Blessing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Be the First](https://btfchallenge.livejournal.com/694.html) challenge.

The satisfied Conqueror settled back upon his rough-hewn throne. Behind him lay the riverbank where thousands drawn from across his allies and holdings had died to secure his empire; before him sprawled the woodland camp of tents and lean-tos where his many warriors celebrated their victory as the captive women wept and shuddered. Even as he so thought, two of his warriors brought the most important and battered captive up before him, the former High Queen.

Lo, for she was a ruin, gloriously so. Her hair, formerly plaited and crowned in gold, now shook around her shoulders in a great tangled mass adorned with sticks and leaves. Her inner dress hung in shreds from her shoulders, torn raggedly down the front to bare all her bruised beauties. She limped and staggered between the swift-marching warriors, her shaking thighs streaked with red, and the only ornaments glinting upon her now were heavy bronze and stone chains dangling from her red-chafed wrists. The face she raised to the Conqueror, once smoothly oval and famously lovely, was now dappled with layered bruises, a scabbed rip dotting the corner of her mouth, her eyes gleaming balefully from blackened circles. 

She looked magnificently trammeled, all his conquest represented in one trembling battered form, and the Conqueror’s smile stretched wide at the sight of her. “My most august Lady,” he addressed her, “how do you this fine morning?”

She spat a bloody gobbet at him. It fell far short, of course, vanishing into the grass, but the leftward warrior cuffed her regardless, knocking her towards the rightward. Her chains swing, pulling her off her feet, and as Rightward caught her at waist and shoulder he pressed his fingers into her flesh, turning his mouth to her ear to murmur into it, his smirk clearly demonstrating his inaudible words.

The Queen flinched from crown to soles, eyelids creasing in pain, and huffed as she struggled to raise her chained hands, intending to shove at the warrior who held her. His fellow snickered and he grinned wider, digging in his grips, and the Conqueror laughed too, rich and full from his belly, before bidding them, “Let her stand.”

The warrior shoved her onto her feet, where she wobbled but steadied, returning her delightfully bitter glare to the Conqueror, who smiled beneficently. “So, have you reconsidered my request?”

“Which one?” she croaked, her voice hoarse from a throat ringed with finger-shaped bruises. “To deliver up an orison for your slaughter or to submit to becoming your slave?”

“Either will do,” he said mildly, and continued as he had the evening before. “Grant me the last of your power, and leave here a simple peasant with the clothes on your back and the life in your veins, or become my concubine and live in comfort beneath my hand. Or, these fine fellows will return you to the common warriors’ camp to continue their assorted pleasure. I offer three choices! Am I not beneficent?”

“Wholly,” she said, dry as a bone, and he laughed again. “Very well, I have chosen, Usurper.”

“Great King,” he corrected her gently, waving off the warriors’ raised hands before they might clout her again. “Well?”

“You may have my blessing,” she said, and as she did, she stood up straight and tall, as if her chains no longer weighed upon her. “You may have my gift, in whole and in full.” She raised her hands, slowly but surely, lifting her palms to the morning sun. “I bless you, _Great King_ , and the men who follow you every one, and your triumphant enterprise in total, with the fullest and most encompassing obscurity!” 

The word rang in the Conqueror’s ears, streaming chill down his spine, freezing him in shock for a brief critical moment. “No songs!” She cried, “no stories, not a memory, not one! You and yours shall vanish from the minds of men for a thousand years and another and longer yet!” She drew breath to say more but the rightward warrior recovered enough to knock her in the belly, folding her over with a cry.

And the Conqueror recovered himself enough to shake off her cold spell under the warm sunlight, to laugh off her empty words as she turned her glare upon him once again. “I see your power is indeed spent,” he told her. “And so is your worth. Back to the camp —“

She rushed him. Long-legged and swift, she gripped her chains and rushed at him, the dismayed warriors lunging after her. She bared her bloody teeth, hefting her chains, and the Conqueror’s spear leapt to his hand, tilting forwards, plunging into her belly before his conscious mind thought a plan.

She had made for herself a fourth choice, and the Conqueror groaned chagrin as he stood from his reflexive crouch, as she fell before him, her blood gushing out across the grass, her filthy hair brushing his feet. “Oh, I am a fool,” he growled, looking down at his warriors looking down at her death.

“More than you even know,” she breathed out, smile wide as his had been, and was still.

* * *** * *

That evening, long hours after the Conqueror had put the fallen Queen’s words from his mind and her corpse beneath the grass, a stumbling serving girl dropped the goblet she held to him, sloshing mead across his arm, and for good measure coughed wetly in his face. “Ugh!” he shouted as he cuffed her, scrubbing himself off with his tunic’s sleeve, and hardly noticed as she crawled away rather than rising.

He did not notice, some hours hence, when her coughing stuttered and stopped as she lay by his tent, when her fevered body shivered to stillness. But he did notice the next day when one of his warriors coughed, then another, then more, foaming at the mouth. And he noticed when the coughing took him too, in great bone-rattling shudders, as all around him a plague stuck his camp and his men sank from triumph to illness and thence to death.

He noticed, until the fever took him, and he rolled off his throne, wheezing and heaving and drowning until he died upon a patch of bloody grass, in company with his collapsing warriors.

A few fled the plague, or somehow survived it, but all alone in unfamiliar forest they died in the jaws of wolves and bears. In a few swift days the formerly triumphant camp lay corpse-crowded, silent but for the buzzing of flies and the cawing of well-fed ravens. No word reached any ear of the previously mighty conquest, no news reached a single far-flung home of any warrior there. And beneath the blanketing sod, lying in her shallow grave, the deposed Queen smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since I heard of the [massive Bronze Age battle at the bridge over the River Tollense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield) I've wondered why such an epic undertaking faded into obscurity (its scale rivals the Trojan War and we read about that even today), and the Be The First challenge gave me an opportunity to write down a short and straightforward idea as to why.


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